


these are the things we lost in the fire

by simplemelodies



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Depression, I'm Sorry, M/M, Nothing to see here, overuse of song lyrics, post s3a
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 03:14:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1065100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplemelodies/pseuds/simplemelodies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles is stupid. He’s brilliant and sharp and has a mind like a bullet train—he gets there faster than even Lydia sometimes, but he’s stupid.  Stiles lets Derek get under his skin. He lets that feeling of pack sit there in his bones and fester and grow into something that is bigger than he wants to admit. They are on this endless cycle, destined to be pulled apart and pushed back together in every scenario, only to be broken apart again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	these are the things we lost in the fire

He feels it settle in that day, this burn, slow and heavy in his bones. And he thinks,  _It’s gotta go away soon. It can’t stay here forever._

He feels the sharp stab against his skin, the prickling of something just underneath the surface. And he thinks,  _I’ve gotta stop it._

He feels it three years later, leaden and concrete, and he knows it’s made a home inside him. And he thinks,  _Will it ever go away?_

He feels it wrap around his heart, worse every day; feels it getting larger and larger, this unspoken thing growing so big he can’t breathe. And he thinks,  _I can’t stop it._

There’s a darkness in him now, there to stay. It’s followed his veins, through his arms, his legs, his bones, all the way to his very eyes. And he thinks,  _When did the world get so dim?_

Because he was promised one day that it would get better, that something would lift and he wouldn’t feel so heavy anymore, so slow. Because he’s supposed to be hyperactive—no filter, no brakes—but he’s stuck without the fuel to even say a sentence. Because they’ve begun asking those questions, ones like “what’s wrong?” and “since when have you been the quiet one?”

Because he has to put on this brave face, and settle his arms onto his best friend’s shoulders. He has to be the one to say, “Dude, you’ll be fine. She’s happy, you’re alive, I’m still—here.” Because he got worse, really bad and really fast, and he doesn’t know what to do. Because he’s used to the set of his bones. Because he’s familiarized himself with the pain around his heart.

Because he’s made a home with what’s inside him. And he thinks,  _I’ll walk them through it._

X

_As your heart gets bigger, and you try to figure out: what’s it all about?  
And your skin gets thicker, as you try to figure out: what’s it all about?_

\--One Day, Kodaline

X

His life went up in flames when he was eighteen years old; it’s been charcoal and scorch marks ever since.

He remembers embers and smoke, and choked sobs carried on the wind from the other side of the yard. He remembers carrying his older sister down creaking steps with blistered feet and hands. He remembers the sound of his mother’s scream when she woke up to be engulfed in betrayal. He remembers that night with a certain clarity that wrenches at his wolf, threatens to make him feral.

He remembers finding two stupid boys in the woods six years and too many lonely nights later. He remembers the sound of the bite and the feeling of _pack_ slipping back over his skin when a high-schooler became a new beta. He remembers a boy with brown eyes and a lanky frame that grew up to be more than a man in less than a year.

X

It hurts. And when he takes a breath in it’s like Icarus. Everything burns and he swears he feels the skin melting off his arms. That heat surrounding him won’t recede—cracks his feet and his armour and his shields and his mind is obliterated. His lungs fill with fire and the shelter around his heart starts to disintegrate. He is burning alive, screaming for someone to please help. So when it finally ends, when he finally gets peace from the blistering wave of heat that surrounded him, he is grateful. He could kiss the ground he walked on if he could move at all. He doesn’t for fear of pain, fear of more than he can handle. Because this burning? This ache on his skin and deep in his bones? He knows it. He understands it and he owns it and he lives with it. And when it comes back with the next phase of the moon, he handles it. 

X

Stiles isn’t stupid. Sometimes he’s dense and loud and could use a good talking-to, but he’s not stupid. He knows this thing with Derek isn’t going anywhere; he can feel it. Some days Derek doesn’t even look at him, doesn’t even give him the courtesy of a “hello” before he presses Stiles against a wall and takes everything Stiles will offer him. He’s not stupid because he is aware that Derek is distant, that he only wants what Stiles can give him physically, because it’s convenient.

Stiles is stupid. He’s brilliant and sharp and has a mind like a bullet train—he gets there faster than even Lydia sometimes, but he’s stupid.  Stiles lets Derek get under his skin. He lets that feeling of _pack_ sit there in his bones and fester and grow into something that is bigger than he wants to admit. They are on this endless cycle, destined to be pulled apart and pushed back together in every scenario, only to be broken apart again.

Stiles is so, so stupid for never wanting it to end.

X

Stiles falls asleep one night with his face pressed against cool sheets and wakes up buried under thick, warm limbs. He doesn’t shift, doesn’t let himself move in fear of disturbing this peace. Derek’s arm is tucked around Stiles’ ribcage, bracketing him in so even if he wanted to get up, Derek’s wolfy strength would prevent it.

So Stiles tilts his head forward and feels little puffs of breath across the nape of his neck, and he sighs. This—this is it, what he’s always needed. Waking up with the security of pack and of hope for some type of future.

Two years ago, they had no future.

They were always meant to crash and burn. As Stiles trails his fingers along tanned skinned stretched tight, he believes this. He knows there is no way they could have made it. There’s no hope for them, for the fragile thing building up under him, in his chest. Stiles exhales, tries to tamp down on the feeling of—of _fearhopeangerlovelovelove_  that has settled in the cage around his heart. He thinks he succeeds, but he still feels like he’s falling, falling, meant to crash and burn. 

X

“My dad loved cannons before—before.” Derek’s lying on his back, staring at the cottage-cheese texture of his bedroom ceiling. Soft sounds come from beside him, little heartbeats and small huffs of breath as his boy listens, half-asleep; piles of comforters and sheets tangle and rise around their bodies. Mountains.

“He—ha—he was human, so he really didn’t have any other way of protecting himself, and mom. Mom, she always hated guns and ammunition in the house, but would allow Dad to keep it all in the back shed, under lock and key because my parents, Stiles, my parents were fucking _smart_.” Smiling, Derek starts running his fingers over Stiles’ ink-stained shoulders. “Anyway, he loved cannons. The sound they made, I guess, and the way his chest punched when they were lit, and vibrated for a good few minutes after. He’d describe it just like that—a punch. Satisfying like one, too.”

Stiles shifts his head a little, snuffling into his arms while he lays on his stomach, drinking in Derek’s voice. “Dad, he’d talk about it. ‘Damn Hales are scaring the tourists again’ he’d say. But he’d never really make you guys stop.”

“Nah, never. Not that Dad ever talked about, anyway. He’d tell me—he’d say ‘Derek, son. Cremate me. Burn my body with wolfsbane and fire and throw away my ashes.’” Derek sucks in a little breath, lets it go. _Breathe_. “He’d told me, a few months before, to take his ashes with me the next time I shot the cannon by myself. ‘Course, I never used that thing on my own. I was _sixteen_ , Stiles. Fucking sixteen and I—.” He kind of chokes off at that, a little surprised he’s gotten this far. Pictures are starting to form in the weird ceiling formations. A hand lands on his stomach, soft and sure and rubbing tiny circles around his navel. _Breathe, breathe. Breathe._ So he does, and he keeps going because now he can’t fucking stop. “And when—when they died, when they fucking went up in flames I didn’t think about it. Dad wanted me to, so I did. Laura was fucking furious, telling me that Dad was her family, too, and that he never once said anything about that.

“And I didn’t listen, because I was sixteen and heartbroken and lost.” And stupid, so freaking stupid. “So I took his ashes and I stuffed them into this cannon, and I aimed at the side of a mountain, right, so I wouldn’t hurt anyone. And I just—I just fucking shot him into the side of a mountain, Stiles, just like he wanted. I didn’t even cover my ears, didn’t because I had been so stupid and angry and I _mourned,_ Stiles, but I deserved not to cover my ears. I wanted it to fucking hurt.”

“Did it?”

“Not as much as I wanted.”

X

A thought nags at the back of Stiles’ mind for a while, curls and sleeps and doesn’t come out until he’s either too asleep to care to too fucked up to keep it at bay. The thought goes something like this:

It’s still there, that fucking deadening in his limbs. It’s there in the way he can’t breathe sometimes. It’s there in his veins, pumping into his heart and his brain and he can’t stop it because it’s always going to be there. It’s a burning in his lungs, something curling into the folds of his skin and making itself at home. It’s not going to leave, never, and he doesn’t know if he wants it to anymore.

Because he’s so freaking used to it at this point that if it just _stopped_ , he’d have to adjust to a whole new Stiles. He’d need to figure himself out again, and he doesn’t think he could do that, not right away.

So he settles for the creaking bones and sad smiles and the way his heart slows down to a crawl when he thinks about tree stumps and ice baths. Stiles, he creates this illusion that he can get better if he just gets used to everything that consumed him for a whole year. And he thinks, yeah, I can do this. Because he has before, when his life was IVs and hospital food. When his life was withering in a bed and finally passing at midnight of his birthday.

But now—now he’s got another life, something he created all his own. He fell in love and out of love and if it could just be more than the on-again-off-again thing, Stiles believes he could be happy. Except maybe he’s already happy. He’s got—he’s got a best friend who’s a werewolf for fuck’s sake. He’s got a dad who would risk his career just to keep his son safe and alive and not underground in a casket next to someone long gone. He’s got himself, his hollow chest and his empty room, and his too-full brain. He’s got Derek, and a love he thought he couldn’t own until it came into his bedroom one afternoon and pressed him against his own door.

Derek, he takes and takes and takes and Stiles thinks he can’t give any more until Derek reaches out and pulls the lead from his bones one night. Stiles thinks he’ll be okay if Derek takes that.

X

_Do you like the person you’ve become under the weight of living?_  
\--Weight of Living, Pt II, Bastille

**Author's Note:**

> There's a quote from my English Comp Textbook, it goes:  
> "I will plunge his remains into the barrel and point it into a hill so that he doesn't take anyone with him. I will light the fuse. But I will not cover my ears. Because when I blow what used to be my dad into the earth, I want it to hurt."  
> And that's where I got the little bit with Derek and his dad. 
> 
> Anyway, this took so much work and so much of my emotional stamina that I'm honestly glad I get to post it. I owe so much to bleep0bleep on tumblr for helping with grammar and such, and to usery for sparking this. You guys, I couldn't have gotten this out without you. 
> 
> Sooooo I think my rambling is done. Thank you so much for the read and I hope you enjoyed.
> 
> X
> 
> "Flames, they licked the walls; tenderly, they turned to dust, all that I adored."


End file.
